题目内容
Robotic Highway ConesA University of Nebraska professor has developed robotic cones and barrels. 1 They can even be programmed to move on their own at any particular part of the day, said Shane Farritor, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Nebraska.For example, if workers arrived at 6 a. m., the cones could move from the side of the highway to block off the lane at that time. 2 "It just seems like a very good application for robots," Farritor said. "The robotic cones would also help remove people from hazardous jobs on the highway putting barrels and cones into place," Farritor said in a report on his creation. 3 The fund allowed Farritor to work on the project with graduate students at Nebraska and his assistant Steve Goddard.The robots are placed at the bottom of the cones and barrels and are small enough not to greatly change the appearance of the construction aides. "It would look exactly the same," Farritor said. "Normally there"s a kind of rubbery, black base to them. 4 "Farritor has talked with officials from the Nebraska Department of Roads about how the robots would be most useful to what they might need.The robots could come in handy following a slow-moving maintenance operation, like painting a stripe on a road or moving asphalt, where now the barrels have to be picked up and moved as the operation proceeds. "That way you don"t have to block off a 10-mile strip for the operation," Farritor said.While prototypes have been made, they are not in use anywhere. Farritor said he has applied for a patent and is considering what to do next. 5 He is also thinking about marketing the robots to roads departments and others across the country who may benefit from them.A. And they can return to the original place at the end of the day.B. He is thinking about starting a small business.C. Farritor was "Inventor of the Year" in 2003.D. Work on the idea began in 2002 using a National Academy of Sciences grant.E. We replace that with a robot.F. These robotic cones and barrels can move out of the way, or into place, from computer commands made miles away.
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
Smoke Gets in Your Mind1. Lung cancer, hypertension, heart disease, birth defects—we are all too familiar with the dangers of smoking. But add to that list a frightening new concern. Mental illness. According to some controversial new findings, if smoking does not kill you, it may, quite literally, drive you to despair.2. The tobacco industry openly pushes its product as something to lift your mood and soothe anxiety. But the short-term feel-good effect may mask the truth: that smoking may worsen or even trigger anxiety disorders, panic attacks and depression, perhaps even schizophrenia.3. Cigarettes and mental illness have always tended to go together. An estimated 1.25 billion people smoke worldwide. Yet people who are depressed or anxious are twice as likely to smoke, and up to 88 per cent of those with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia smokers. A recent American survey concluded that around half of all cigarettes burn in the fingers of those with mental illness.4. But the big question is why The usual story is that the illness comes first. Mentally ill people take up smoking, or smoke more to alleviate some of their distress. Even when smoking seems to start before the illness, most doctors believe that early but invisible symptoms of the disorder spark the desire to light up. But perhaps something more sinister is going on.5. A growing number of researchers claim that smoking is the cause, not the consequence of clinical depression and several forms of anxiety. "We know a lot about the effects of smoking on physical health, and now we are also starting to see the adverse effects in new research on mental illness," says Naomi Breslau, director of research at the Henry Ford Health Care System in Detroit.6. Breslau was one of the first to consider this heretical possibility. The hint came from studies, published in 1998, which followed a group of just over 1,000 young adults for a five-year period. The 13 percent who began the study with major depression were around three times more likely to progress from being light smokers to daily smokers during the course of the study, though there was no evidence that depression increased the tendency to take up smoking. But a history of daily smoking before the study commenced roughly doubled the risk of developing major depression during the five-year period. Smoking, it seems, could predate illness.7. At first Breslau concluded that whatever prompts people to smoke might also make them depressed. But as the results of other much larger studies began to back the statistical link, she became more convinced than ever that what she was seeing were signs that smoking, perhaps the nicotine itself, could somehow affect the brain and cause depression.8. One of these larger studies was led by Goodman, a pediatrician. She followed the health of two groups of teenagers for a year. The first group of 8,704 adolescents were not depressed, and might or might not have been smokers, while the second group of 6,947 were highly depressed and had not been smokers in the past month. After a year her team found that although depressed teenagers were more likely to have become heavy smokers, previous experimentation with smoking was the strongest predictor of such behavior, not the depression itself. What is more important is that teenagers who started out mentally fit but smoked at least one packet per week during the study were four times more likely to develop depression than their non-smoking peers. Goodman says that depression does not seem to start before cigarette use among teens. "Current cigarette use is however, a powerful determinant of developing high depressive symptoms."9. Breslau, too, finds that smokers are as much as four times more likely to have an isolated panic attack and three times more likely to develop longer-term panic disorder than non-smokers. It"s a hard message to get across, because many smokers say they become anxious when they quit, not when they smoke. But Breslau says that this is a short-lived effect of withdrawal which masks the reality that, in general, smokers have higher anxiety levels than non-smokers or ex-smokers. Paragragh 6 ______
Photos Big Business NowPhotos that you might have found down the back of your sofa are now big business! In 2005, the American artist Richard Prince"s photograph of a photographer, Untitled (Cow- boy), was sold for $1,248,000.Prince is certainly not the only contemporary artist to have worked with so-called "found photographs"—a loose term given to everything from discarded(丢弃的) prints discovered in a junk shop to old advertisements or amateur photographs from a stranger"s family album.The German artist Joachim Schmid, who believes "basically everything is worth looking at", has gathered discarded photographs, postcards and newspaper images since 1982. In his on-going project, Archiv, he groups photographs of family life according to themes: people with dogs; teams; new cars; dinner with the family; and so on.Like Schmid, the editors of several self-published art magazines also champion (捍卫) found photographs. One of them, called simply Found, was born on one snowy night in Chicago, when Davy Rothbard returned to his car to find under his wiper (雨刷) an angry note intended for someone else: "Why"s your car HERE at HER place" The note became the starting point for Rothbard"s addictive publication, which features found photographs sent in by readers, such as poster discovered in our drawer.The whole found-photograph phenomenon has raised some questions. Perhaps one of the most difficult is: can these images really be considered as art And if so, whose art Yet found photographs produced by artists, such Richard Prince, may riding his horse hurriedly to meet someone Or how did Prince create this photograph It"s anyone"s guess. In addition, as we imagine the back-story to the people in the found photographs artists, like Schmid, have collated (整理), we also turn toward to our own photographic albums. Why is memory so important to us Why do we all seek to freeze in time the faces of our children, our parents, our lovers, and ourselves Will they mean anything to anyone after we"ve goneIn the absence of established facts, the vast collections of found photographs give our minds an opportunity to wander freely. That, above all, is why they are so fascinating. The author"s attitude towards to found photographs can be described as ______.
Excessive Demands on Young PeopleBeing able to multitask is hailed by most people as a welcome skill, but not according to a recent study which claims that young people between the ages of eight and eighteen of the so-called Generation M are spending a considerable amount of their time in fruitless efforts as they multitask. It argues that, in fact, these young people are frittering away as much as half of their time again as they would if they performed the very same tasks one after the other.Some young people are juggling an ever larger number of electronic devices as they study. At the same time that they are working, young adults are also surfing on the Internet, or sending out emails to their friends, and/or answering the telephone and listening to music on their iPods or on another computer. As some new device comes along, it is also added to the list rather than replacing one of the existing devices.Other research has indicated that this multitasking is even affecting the Way families themselves function as young people are too wrapped up in their own isolated worlds to interact with the other people around them. They can no longer greet family members when they enter the house nor can they eat at the family table.All this electronic wizardry is supposedly also seriously affecting young people"s performance at university and in the workplace. When asked about their perception of the impact of modern gadgets on their performance of tasks, the overwhelming majority of young people gave a favorable response.The response from the academic and business worlds was not quite as positive. The former feel that multitasking with electronic gadgets by children affects later development of study skills, resulting in a decline in the quality of writing, for example, because of the lack of concentration on task completion. They feel that many undergraduates now urgently need remedial help with study skills. Similarly, employers feel that young people entering the workforce need to be taught all over again, as they have become deskilled.While all this may be true, it must be borne in mind that more and more is expected of young people nowadays; in fact, too much. Praise rather than criticism is due in respect of the way today"s youth are able to cope despite what the older generation throw at them. In dealing with today"s youth, what approach should parents take
The Northern LightsThe sun is stormy and has its own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun"s gravity cannot hold its atmosphere in check! Energy flows away from the Sun toward the Earth in a stream of electrified particles that move at speeds around a million miles per hour. These particles are called plasma, and the stream of plasma coming from the Sun is called the solar wind. The more active the Sun, the stronger the solar wind.The solar wind constantly streams toward the Earth, but don"t worry because a protective magnetic field surrounds our planet. The same magnetic field that makes your compass point north also steers the particles from the Sun to the north and south poles. The charged particles become trapped in magnetic belts around the Earth. When a large blast of solar wind crashes into the Earth"s magnetic field, the magnetic field first gets squeezed and then the magnetic field lines break and reconnect.The breaking and reconnecting of the magnetic field lines can cause atomic particles called electrons trapped in the belts to fall into the Earth"s atmosphere at the poles. As the electrons fall into the Earth, they collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere, creating flashes of light in the sky. Each atmospheric gas glows a different color. Oxygen and nitrogen glows red and green and nitrogen glows violet-purple. As these various colors glow and dance in the night sky, they create the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights.Watching auroras is fun and exciting, but normally you can only see them in places far north like Alaska and Canada. The movement of the aurora across the sky is usually slow enough to easily follow with your eyes but they can also pulsate, flicker, or even move like waves. During solar maximum, auroras are seen as far south as Florida, even Mexico!Auroras often seem to be very close to the ground, but the lowest aurora is still about 100 kilometers above the ground, a distance much higher than clouds are formed or airplanes can fly. A typical aurora band can be thousands of kilometers long, a few hundred kilometers high, but only a few hundred meters thick.We hope you are able to travel to far-north places like the Arctic Circle and see the Northern Lights at least once during your lifetime. We know you will never forget it! Tens of thousands of tourists take special trips to Norway and Sweden every year to watch the Northern Lights.
微信支付 
支付宝支付